ReadWriteHack

A few weeks in advance of Microsoft's first technical revelations about the structure of Windows 8, the company's Windows group president Steven Sinofsky yesterday revealed the names of the new operating system's various design committees in a post inaugurating the new "Building Windows 8" blog.

But given the opportunity today, the company declined all comment for ReadWriteWeb on what many of the committees' names actually mean, or why certain groups appear to have been given autonomous assignments. It's more than just a nomenclatural issue: With Windows 7, the group called "Color" ended up being the fundamental design group that helped redesign the Taskbar and introduce the jump list, two of Win7's most appreciated features.

Angry Birds has been ported from mobile phones to netbooks. The game is now available from all versions of Intel AppUp center, including those distributed by Best Buy, Best Buy Canada, Future Shop, Dixons, Walmart, Asus, Croma, HSN, New Egg and TigerDirect.

Angry Birds makes an interesting case study for developers porting applications from one interface to another. Previously, we covered Conceptualizing Your Ported Application on the Netbook Platform.

Bitcoin is an open source, peer-to-peer electronic currency created by Satoshi Nakamoto and maintained by a small team of developers. As part of what's turning into an ongoing series on the distributed Web, I talked to contributor Gavin Andresen about how the software works. This is a technical overview. If you're interested in an economic or political look at the software, you can read the Wikipedia entry or Niklas Blanchard's essay on the project.

We keep hearing about how people can do everything they would need to do on a desktop on an iPad now. Heck, Damon Albarn even composed the a new Gorillaz Album on an iPad.

But what about developers? Can you code on an iPad? Several developer-centric text editing apps have been released, but most fall a little short of what developers need to actually get their jobs done. We've narrowed the list of available code editors down to the three most useful.

Do use one of these for your development work? Is there a better editor that we didn't mention?

Programming languages aren't the only concern for developers porting applications from one platform to another. However, with today's diversity of devices developers need to consider how hardware and interfaces affect user experience. This case study from Intel explores the process of porting applications to netbooks.

Last week RedMonk's James Governor asked on Twitter: "Software Developers: do you think vertical industry expertise is important to your career?" The responses were interesting. Most seemed to think that vertical experience is important, but a few disagreed. Laurence Hart noted that vertical experience is important for moving into roles other than development. Gareth Rushgrove said yes, but mainly for "taking something that a specific vertical is good at, then applying it to a different vertical." Simon Brown dissented, saying it wasn't important "provided you have the ability to pick up what you need."

What do you think? Is vertical experience important for your career?

The process for creating apps for netbook apps is very similar to creating apps for any other platform. You need to ask yourself who your audience is, how to hold their attention and what devices you are going to support. Dmitry Rizschkov has some advice for developers thinking about these questions.

Developer Daniel Fischer wrote a VIM tutorial for TextMate users. Fischer, a long time TextMate user, decided it was time to make the jump to a more advanced editor. Fischer wanted to take advantage VIM features like split-windows, and the many plugins available. Fischer covers getting started, making yourself at home in MacVIM and common pitfalls.

Last week we told you about this tutorial to get started with Hadoop. If you want to go further with Hadoop, you might want a dedicated development environment. Karmasphere offers both a free "community edition" and a paid professional version of its Hadoop development environment for prototyping, development and debugging of Hadoop jobs. Has anyone used it? What did you think?

Today there are a multitude of developer environments available, from lightweight text editors on up to Microsoft Visual Studio. Some are free and open source, others are expensive and proprietary. Everyone has a favorite - what's yours? It doesn't have to be the one you use at work everyday, you can vote for the one you'd prefer to use.